Threes
by cruces
Summary: You don't need friends when you're a supervillain. Crossover: Fantastic Four; Journey Into Mystery. –WIP on hiatus.–
1. I

I.

"I have heard tell," Loki began, "of a fountain of eternal life, which pools at the bottom of a colossal bowl, which swings from the umbilical cord of a hideous beast, which hangs on the wall of an long-abandoned shrine to the first horror of the universe, the giant who first threshed the living from the dead."

Water slowly seeped down the walls, carving channels in the lichen. The light from the overhead lamps flickered, briefly shaking the deep shadows from their customary place beneath the scientific instruments, the sheaves of paper, and the dusty curios that littered the worktables. Centipedes implanted with monitoring devices scurried across the darkened corners of the laboratory. Doom looked up from the slide he had been examining under a microscope.

"That is not even a real story."

Loki pushed aside a stack of lime-green petri dishes and sat on the worktable next to the microscope. "I _said_ 'I have heard tell.' Plausible deniability, man."

Doom turned his attention back to the slide, making a tiny adjustment to the magnification. "I do not care. You had better seek your entertainment somewhere else as I am engaged in fascinating and important research."

"Fountain of eternal life," Loki whined. "_Ghastly first horrors of the universe_."

Doom ignored him and made another incremental adjustment to a dial. Loki kicked off from the table and circled around to the other side, clicking his ragged nails on plastic- and glass-ware as he went. "Come now. Your coffers overfloweth, your enemies are content to slink, and the affairs of your country are well in order. Moreover I happen to know," Loki said pointedly, "that you have been staring at that piece of glass for over an hour."

"They keep getting stuck in prophase," Doom muttered. His eyes were certainly getting tired. He pushed the microscope aside. "Since all that is true, no better time than now, then, to make preparations for my future battles."

"Exactly," Loki said, doing a bit of slinking himself to get back to Doom's side of the table. "Eternal youth!"

"You said eternal life."

"Eternal life!" Loki said. "It's one or the other and only one or the other, and," he added, "whichever the defect of this miraculous liquid, you would surely find it within your means to improve upon, no?"

"Nothing is beyond Doom's genius," Doom replied.

"But the perilous path to this fountain, I fear, may be more than a match for you," Loki said, then went on, seeing Doom's armored hands twitch, "and likewise me, but together..."

"What value could it possibly have for one such as yourself?"

"You're welcome to the fountain; there are things that those wretched ruins hide and the beast's jaws grasp," Loki said, tossing a careless hand in the air. "I would see for myself."

It was as close an admission to boredom as Loki ever allowed. Occasionally he would appear, uninvited, in pursuit of intelligence or aid or simple amusement; sometimes the first two put Doom at a distinct advantage, the third, though of value, manifest in riddles, always Loki. Doom propped his elbows up on the arms of his solid oak chair and steepled his hands. "I was planning on paying the Fantastic Four a visit. Richards is working on a new type of nanobot."

Loki gave him a plain look that communicated just how perfectly wonderful and exciting he thought this plan to be. Doom ignored it and started leafing through his notes regarding the misbehavior of the cellular organisms on the slide.

"He's _always_ working on nanobots. Or cosmic weather balloons. Or cancer cures for puppies."

"No, he cured a canine cancer only last week."

"We'll zip over to the netherworld, acquire the fabled drink, and return in time for supper," Loki promised him. Doom stared at the figures on the page then abruptly tossed the notes aside, deciding that it would be faster to start over from scratch. The papers fluttered to the floor. An incinerator robot peeked out from around a canister of liquid helium, then retreated at a sideways glare from its creator. Doom sat back and contemplated the rows upon rows of slides lining the table surface that represented six weeks of fruitless work.

"I am not inviting you to supper."

Picking over the worktable clutter, Loki flipped over a plate with a half-eaten pheasant stuck to the china with grease and righted an empty silver goblet. Doom tapped his fingers on a chair arm in irritation. "I'm crushed," Loki said very sincerely, and then walked over to drape himself over the tall back of Doom's chair. "I shan't keep you long; I pledge to you that Mr. Fantastic won't cure even half a cancer while we're away."

"Richards _is_ pathetically slow in translating his theories into action because of his foolish adherence to an outmoded form of ethics," Doom said.

With a firm nod, Loki reached down, and clawing his fingers into Doom's cloak, hustled him out of his seat. "It would cost you nothing to take pity on his endeavors, so far is he beneath you."

"As if it needed to be said," Doom said to that, rearranging how his cloak draped around his shoulders.

Loki batted his eyelashes. Truly it was a hideous sight. "But you like to hear it all the same."

"Hmph," Doom said, but let Loki steer him toward the far side of the laboratory. Kept clear of scientific equipment for the time being, it was occupied instead by a team of cleaning robots busily scrubbing crusty organic matter from the walls and floors. Doom dismissed them with a wave, making the robots scurry into the alcoves that opened up in the walls, the stones sliding neatly apart and then seamlessly back into place.

Loki strode past Doom and stooped down to examine the faint traces that the robots had not quite yet cleaned up. Doom crossed his arms.

"What sort of netherworld?"

"Wouldn't you rather be surprised?" Loki asked innocently.

"You must provide me with more variables if you wish for my assistance."

"Company," Loki said. Doom snorted.

"I am afraid yours is, as it often is, rather lacking."

Loki chortled, eyes tracing a splatter pattern on the floor. He bit his left thumb, let three drops fall, and straightened. The droplets hit the ground then rolled like marbles into a groove between the flagstones. "You won't want for amusement where I'm taking you."

"If this proves uninteresting—" Doom warned.

Loki smiled. "Oh no. It'll be fun."

"So you say," Doom said. The unsaid "for me" required no further comment on his part. The air surrounding them was already becoming warmer and drier, filling with tiny flashes of green light. The damp stone walls of the underground laboratory steadily grew up and out, dividing into evenly spaced columns then growing to the proportions of tall trees. The surface of the stone cracked with a sharp sound like ice floes breaking apart. Bark now covered the gray of the trees, a stained-glass skin stretched over the stone. Loki was looking up, where the branches crossed each other like the arches of the insides of a Gothic cathedral. The ground beneath them cracked, too, into a regular pattern—a simple decorative maze.

"Don't look down," Loki said, "it will snare you."

"Pah," Doom said, but shifted his gaze to the trunks of the trees, which shuddered; the glass changed color from green to red.

"Quickly," Loki said, walking after one of the droplets. It was rolling away, fitting itself to one of the grooves in the pattern. Picking up speed, the sphere expanded into the size of a small coin, and then flattened itself into a paper-thin disk. It resembled a spoked wheel and was made of some dark substance that glittered in the orange light that suffused the stone forest. Doom looked behind them. "And the others–"

"They'll find us eventually," Loki said, grabbing Doom's arm and starting to run, his feet making no sound; Doom's heavy boots thudded on the stone. He flung his arm free and matched Loki's strides, keeping his eyes forward. The trees along their way were thinning. Air rushed by them in thick gray streams. Loki grabbed Doom by the arm again and brought them up short as the wheel shot up and disintegrated into a fine amber mist that dispersed upwards in a spiral and then disappeared. The orange light faded away, replaced by a murky grayish fog that flowed down from above.

"A curious amount of effort to expend for such a measly signal," Doom observed, wheezing slightly even though they had seemingly run only a minute or two. He freed his arm from Loki's grasp and slowly turned around.

The stone trees had receded, and in their place a seemingly endless field of low, identical stone cubes stretched as far as the eye could see, reminiscent of a vast, anonymous, and yet painstakingly maintained graveyard. The cubes, each about a meter high, were placed in a regular grid. Space for five more lay between each cube, and was heaped with smooth flat pebbles in the colors of the sky. Doom turned to Loki. "An exchange, was it?"

"The path is very particular about being traveled on. It must be appeased somehow, so: blood to build it a house, give it legs, bridge its passing to the next world," Loki confirmed. "Nothing extraordinary for me, of course, but too much for mortal sorcerers, perhaps."

"Hardly," Doom said. "And I am no mere mortal, or sorcerer."

"So you say."

"Does this place have a name?"

"Call it whatever you like," Loki said. Doom refused, judging the matter unimportant. Keeping an eye on Loki, he examined one of the stone cubes from a distance. Upon closer inspection the vertical faces bore faint runes, almost impossible to make out and resembling nothing on Earth. The top of each cube was faintly curved inward, and a thin layer of oil-polluted water rippled in the depressions. The iridescent surface reflected different scenes. Doom found them hard to make out, for the water continuously moved, following no discernible pattern—the air was dead; the ground did not tremble. Doom paused at one of the cubes. It displayed a red sky streaked with black clouds and flashes of violet lightning before shimmering into incoherent patches of color.

"Curious," Doom repeated. He turned to Loki, who had his head craned forward, eyes searching the horizon. "What _was_ that signal?"

Loki turned his attention to him and pointed at a rapidly growing speck on a cube before them. It stretched away from the stone and started to grow claws and legs. "A dinner bell."

Doom bristled. "You brought me here to be bait?"

"Here they prefer mortal flesh, brined in the small hours," Loki told him, standing idly as the thing began to pull itself free. "In time accelerated and fine-grained. Gods don't suit their palate."

"Company, indeed."

"A steadfast pleasure," Loki said, eyes twinkling. "Perhaps I shall watch the monster tear you limb from limb."

"Unlikely."

Loki threw his head back and clapped his hands together. "Look sharp!"

Adjusting his gauntlets, Doom took a cautious step back as a leonine body fell into the ground before them, throwing up debris with its sharp claws. Its ram's head was breathing hard and smoke billowed from its nostrils. A criosphinx—Doom had never seen one in the flesh, only in the pages of old bestiaries. It gnashed its teeth, setting off sparks between sharp, yellowed fangs, and lunged. Diving to the right, Doom hurled a pulse of dark energy at the beast, but it tossed its head, dodging, and slammed into him without slowing down. As his back hit the ground, Doom threw up an arm and felt the metal there constrict as the criosphinx caught it between its jaws. He punched his fist into its mouth with a direct blast, turning his face away, and this time had the satisfaction of hearing teeth exploding, the flying shards tinkling against the surface of his armor.

"Mortal men think you first have to take a thing apart," Doom heard Loki say. He looked up from ripping out a handful of fangs by their roots to see Loki shaking his head from side to side.

"After I am done here, I am going to drain you of your blood and carve up your carcass," Doom informed Loki as he shoved the beast's bleeding mouth away from his face, the very picture of calm beneath its mask. He kicked the criosphinx over onto its back and crushed its sternum with a stomp of his boot. It let out a pathetic sound, halfway between a bleat and a roar.

"If you want to see butchery, all you have to do is ask," Loki said. He held up a hand as Doom advanced towards him. "Observe."

Sidestepping Doom's glowering figure, Loki reached down to the heaving criosphinx, and with a thumb and forefinger, pulled out an eye, tossed it aside, and drew out the membranes of the socket, laced with diaphanous fat. The beast staggered up and let out an unhappy bleat, spitting forth its stringy tongue, then its innards.

"Cavil at me, will you," Loki said, giving the criosphinx a smack. "Get."

Leveling a deathly one-eyed stare at Doom, the criosphinx lumbered in place. Then with a bleat, the criosphinx picked up its feet and circled the cube from which it had emerged, intestines trailing behind and wrapping around the cube, all the while becoming fainter and fainter. The fangs that Doom had flung to the ground wheeled themselves behind the creature's passage; the spilt blood followed those, rippling dryly over the pebbles; the crushed eye went last like a slug.

"What a cheeky memory," Loki exclaimed. "You should give it a good disemboweling if we see it again."

"I decline," Doom said, swaying. The protective spells that lay across his armor crackled alarmingly. He abruptly sat down, head spinning. "I—"

"Be valiant," Loki sing-songed, not looking up from intently studying the cube, once more nearly blank. Doom watched him smear the thimbleful of goop on his fingers diagonally across the near face of the stone.

"Your trifling scheme does not concern me," Doom retorted. He laid himself down in the most graceful manner possible. The air in his lungs seemed to be trailing away as though being spun by a leisurely, unseen spindle. He noticed that the sky was entirely made of stars of glass and bronze and diamond. They reflected a broken expanse of skeletons laid out in a dizzying matrix.

"Be unperturbed," Loki said. He began to scoop up of pebbles from the base of the cube. "This nerve hasn't ossified yet—"

"We're inside the giant's skull," Doom breathed out. It was difficult to talk. Everything shivered once, named.

"They built the shrine inside the thing it enshrined," Loki said, admiration in his voice, a pleased expression on his face. "The memory-beast makes for a neat offering, does it not? Though the altars are in the entrails are in the altars..."

Black lights flashed before Doom's eyes, but he gamely asked, "How do you know the eye-fat does anything? Why not the heart?"

"Oh, so you would take the heart."

"If I wished it."

"How does anything do anything?" Loki asked. "I trod here and shall again."

Doom groused. "You have an unfair advantage."

"What can I say? I am rich in time," Loki quipped.

"You are wasting mine."

"Yes, mortals are a parsimonious lot," Loki said. Doom let out an impatient sigh, and Loki snickered. "Help me dig," he said. Doom only turned his head to balefully glare and stayed lying where he was. Loki was grinning; next to him the remnants of a stone wall, overgrown with moss, led Doom's eyes down to a steep spiraling staircase descending into a formless deep. Over the edges of the opening in the ground, endless waves of pebbles fell in a soundless cascade. Loki extended a hand to Doom, who struck it aside and climbed to his feet, short of breath as though he had been running up a tall mountain carrying a knapsack full of lead.

"No mere mortal, he," Loki mockingly said to the stones at the wall's base, each carved in relief with the head of a ram. They bleated; several attempted to grab a mouthful of the pebbles streaming past them into the pit.

"Dig for what?" Doom asked, ignoring the impertinent faces that frowned at him.

"But that's very good," Loki said, his expression calculating. "You don't lose sight of the thread."

"No. But I am growing weary of your game."

"Just a ways further. We've made another offering to match, so we'll be given another sign."

"We?"

"Witch's blood," Loki said, pointing. Doom looked down to see blood bubbling out from the middle of his chest. The gloved hand he passed over the metal came away wet and confirmed that the armor was still intact. His defenses had held, and he felt no pain. But it was his; Doom was well acquainted with the smell.

"You seem uncharacteristically honest today," he said thoughtfully.

"Deadly places encourage truth. You said giant's skull, and you are quite right," Loki told Doom, reaching out and passing a palm over the blood spreading, rose-like, over the breastplate. "You saw a forest of stone, and that is right, too. As for the stumps... well. Harvested bald in not my reckoning, I should say. I would have found the road on my own otherwise, taking direction from the branches. Though they make for poor compasses, and poor mirrors withal, that tarnish at a stray look—"

"You would know."

"I know very little," Loki airily replied. "But fortune favors fools like us."

"Hmph."

"How do you feel? Afraid? Like dying?"

"Like wringing you neck."

"You are dying, every moment," Loki said. Doom snorted. "Then make haste before I finally tire of your foolishness."

Loki laughed a little. "Down we shall go," he said, stepping onto the winding staircase. He raised the hand smeared with Doom's blood and it shone, lighting the way.

"Entrails, you said," Doom recalled as he followed, still short of breath. The same glow suffused his own form, dispersing some of the darkness. Strange sights greeted him in the space the light revealed: runes that flitted over the walls enveloping the staircase like mayflies just awakened to life beneath the sun; more carved faces taken from animals that had never existed; the falling pebbles slowing, drifting, opening and dancing like anemones under the sea and more. Drops of blood continued to fall from his chestplate, but did not remain where they landed—they bounced, formed tiny marching soldiers, knights on horseback, banners and carts, and trailed his steps, shining and red.

"Bowels," Loki said brightly.

"Some altar."

"Whole worlds swing from it."

"The cord, is it? But we were just there, where we are headed."

"It goes round and round," Loki responded, sounding aggrieved.

"I see."

Eventually the way flattened. Doom's breath came more easily and even the blood slowed, though it did not cease; Loki let out a seemingly pointless whistle at one point in his general direction, which Doom purposefully ignored. They were walking through a hall now, lined with the same stone and littered with quartz spalls, gold brooches, long bones, metal links and splinters of a gray wood. White-leaved ivy carpeted the uneven floor. Bit by bit the darkness paled and the ceiling opened up and the falling pebbles picked up speed, first becoming snow that froze their skin, then rain that soaked them entirely through. Doom was shivering when they reached the hallway's end. The miniscule army trailing him drooped, a picture of misery.

They were in a clearing again—perhaps the same clearing from before, with the same stone trees standing guard. A low square slab of granite, washed clean from the rain, occupied the center.

"A rock. Astounding," Doom said as he came to a stop. The marchers skirted his feet and continued wobbling past, unimpressed.

Paying Doom's lack of enthusiasm no heed, Loki declared it stupendous and nearly broke out into a dance before transforming the impulse into a swishing of his cape and a minor adjustment to his helm. "The ones before would congeal right away and I never could venture this far and back but you," he said happily, "well done."

Doom lowered himself to the ground. His body felt too heavy. His cloak squelched. "Is that it?" he asked.

Loki looked offended at the question. He directed Doom's attention to the altar.

After a long pause, after laboriously rising to his feet, Doom said: "I challenge you to just _try_."

"The blood you have left wouldn't be enough to make a handprint, much less a proper sacrifice," Loki said with a sniff. He strode to the altar and began to scratch a series of symbols into the altar's base. The rain that fell from the sky, as Loki worked, gradually let up and entirely stopped behaving like water; instead of shattering upon impact, the raindrops rolled down, still spherical, from where they landed. Softer than hail. One of the drops flashed, and Loki's arm shot out to catch it before it could hit. The blood glittered between Loki's bony fingers. The tip of his tongue sticking out, Loki carefully daubed the droplet, turning into the consistency of putty, over the runes he had just scored into the rock. Doom recognized the symbols and stood apart, perplexed.

"So all this was in order to claim this realm as your own," he stated.

"No, nothing like that."

"That is a spell to be activated at a later time, then," he tried.

"Oh, certainly not."

At the realization, Doom briefly found himself at a loss for words. Loki took the opportunity to sit back on his heels and admire his handiwork.

"You came here... to scribble graffiti."

"Aye. Loki was here."

A moment's silence descended between them.

"I have decided to draw from the veins in your face," Doom serenely said.

Loki's nose wrinkled. He pointed at the ground. "Best save that energy for your recompense."

Doom tracked the gesture and saw the line of the march, the blood soldiers circling him and the rock, Loki looking on with interest. Chessmen bearing jet-black arms reared up from the altar's shadow. They drew even with the soldiers, a matching, inside circle. A cry went up and everything shivered again. The figures stabbed and hacked and beheaded one another, each falling at his opponent's feet. Their arms and legs mingled together, melting a trench into the earth and raising tall columns into the air. Outside the circle stone cubes rose from the ground; Doom saw that they were indeed stumps of trees beheaded in the flower of youth, only viscera left floating in the smooth hollow necks.

The ground curved beneath Doom's feet. Water licked up to his ankles, then his knees, then his waist, and continued to climb. His reflection stood at the very peak of a giant's skull, clear water streaming over the dome, an unceasing fountain. Loki hailed Doom from the pool's edge, from the far shore, only the gleam from his golden armor visible, now, through the mist thrown up by the ocean's churning. Iridescent scales the size of buildings wriggled just below its surface.

"Swiftly, lest you find that the waters of the fountain of life and the fountain of death are one and the same."

"Which is it?"

"Which is what?"

"Eternal youth, or eternal life?"

Loki shrugged.

"_Face_," Doom vowed. Loki just laughed. The unbearable roar of falling water grew dimmer, as did the harsh light reflecting off the sea of bone. Doom fell against the wall of his laboratory and looked out into its cluttered interior once again. The joints of his armor had rusted. The amulets hammered into the metal were drowned, every single one. His cloak stank of copper.

"Now you know my very important secret. Trial and error on an immortal scale."

"I could have done without it," Doom said.

"I trust it was all quite droll," Loki went on. He brandished a leafy twig in one hand. "I even got myself a souvenir."

"You seem pleased."

"As should you be."

Doom made a derisive sound. Loki shook his head from side to side. "Truly. You've earned my esteem, I who bore witness to the first infernal night." His gaze was by turns pitiless and fond. "I'll remember you to the final sacred day."

It was Doom's turn to shake his head. "I will live to spit on your bones."

Loki waved him goodbye, disappearing from view. "That said, I'll leave you to your fascinating and important research. But whatever will you do with this new wealth of knowledge?"

"Plant trees," Doom grimly said.

•••••


	2. II

II.

Torches, half burnt, threw wild shadows against the escutcheons that lined the gallery. It opened into a round room with a high ceiling that housed a half blind bat, fur without luster and talons brittle with age. Sometimes its droppings would fall to mar the polished marble floor below, even the splendid emerald of his cloaks, but Doom tolerated its presence—once upon a time the same bat had performed a great service, demolishing a maddening horde of mosquitoes that had kept him from concentrating on his work. It was Doom's suspicion that the insects had been cursed, or uncanny, or both, since that summer evening had long since gone, likewise their halcyon days, and still the bat clung to the rafters, somehow preserved in life if not in juvenescence. Doom harbored elaborate plans to cut it open to see if his hunches would bear fruit; year after year the bat did not die. Theirs was a minor war of attrition.

The villa, converted into a secret stronghold, lay far from Doom's castle. It was prudent that he make himself scarce after the failure of his latest plan. The narrow windows were left open, letting in fresh air and the last of the day's light. In the room, lit with lamps, Doom did not wallow, or commiserate; instead he was engaged in triage, rooting out errors and eradicating obsolete components. A discarded pauldron leaned against a stack of wooden crates; an ice gel pack was secured against the bare shoulder. The rest of Doom's armor revealed signs of the previous battle, largely cosmetic scratches, but also a few places where blued ornaments had split, exposing the sinews of the various spells worked into the plate. Doom's skin under those patches itched from flakes of blood and dried sweat—an insignificant distraction.

Trays in many different shapes and sizes surrounded the workbench where Doom sat. The surface of the rest of the available furniture—couches, tables, sideboards, and a lone, three-legged stool—were piled high with odds and ends. He was poring over a recalcitrant piston from an engine in a frightful state of dismantlement. To one side were miniature blowtorches, soldering irons, and pliers, and on the other side, quincuncial powder heaps, dried fish bladders, olivine chips and cedar shavings, a tranquilized hen with its feathers dyed. Doom pulled the cylinder loose, applied it to a polishing wheel, and then fit it into a smaller tube. He set the new piston aside and reached for a bar of solder.

"It was a sterling battle. Until your automatons exploded, anyway," Loki's voice said from somewhere above. Doom did not bother to look up from his welding. A bird with coal-black feathers dropped from the ceiling, turning itself into a familiar shape midway and landing like a cat. Loki strolled around the workbench and nudged aside the straw baskets on a divan to sprawl among the cushions. "When did you learn I was here?" Loki queried.

"Nothing is hidden from Doom."

"How sad, to live a life deficient in the sense of surprise and wonder."

"Facile words from one whose joys derive from anticipation and not discovery."

That vexed him. Loki rolled over onto his stomach and propped his chin up with one hand. "I think there were very few real surprises in your life. You'll die–"

"No."

"–sure that you've won, and by virtue of being mortal, you'll know the truth of that feeling only once in your life. It will be enough. You wouldn't want to know more than that."

Tightening a screw into place in the engine, Doom set aside the ratchet and picked up a burnt-out circuit board. "You are quite mistaken," he said conversationally. Loki tsked.

"If you know too much you'll become trapped inside your own marvelous head, where everything is known, forever. Essentially time becomes meaningless. But even if your mind becomes the master of time, the life of your body is ruled by time, who is a friend to no one."

"Your unsolicited advice has been duly noted," Doom said. From a squat glass jar crammed with writing implements, Doom selected a fountain pen, filled it with ink, and opened a ledger. For several minutes only these sounds disturbed the silence: nib scratching paper, the ancient bat yawning, and Doom making minute adjustments to the mechanical components of the experiment at hand.

"You may live to regret spurning my counsel."

"You are all talk."

"I come from a people who are of all talk," Loki concurred. He fidgeted in place, he listed, and then he tapped his feet.

"This would go so much faster if you weren't compelled to keep notes," Loki complained, rolling up into a sitting position on the divan. "Can't you keep some of it memorized? What good is that big brain for if you insist on writing everything down?"

Doom completed the sentence he was on and tossed his fountain pen aside. "These papers are for the benefit of lesser minds," he said. Loki looked at him blankly.

"To consult. When people build museums and monuments to my unparalleled glory," Doom explained. "And there will be books, naturally. A curricula of my achievements for schoolchildren the world over to absorb."

"Verily thou art a king among dreamers, Victor von Doom."

"I also make a note of your insolence."

Loki let out an extravagant sigh.

"If you have nothing else to do, at least try to refrain from razing my residence to the ground while I am away," Doom told Loki as he tidied up. He put the hen into a willow basket with a woven loop and slung it over his good shoulder.

"You don't expect me to be capable of _better_," Loki exclaimed, feigning astonishment.

"No," Doom said, agreeing. "Yet I would be wholly unsurprised if you happened to be." He stood and drew up the illusion of a shoulder piece over the missing place in his armor. With a sign he burnished the rest into seeming newness except for the gauntlets, replacing them with a pair that had been resting beside him on the bench.

"Where are you going with iron gloves?" Loki asked curiously.

"Levying fines and enforcing laws..." Doom said under his breath. Undeterred, Loki invited himself along; Doom muttered some more and trudged out of the villa by a hidden door that opened directly out into the surrounding forest. They pushed through thick undergrowth then trekked downhill along a seldom-used deer track, overgrown on either side with shrubs. They reached a fork in the path, and Doom took them left, at the next fork, to the right. Presently the deer track dwindled and the incline grew feeble. Doom brought them to a halt when an empty paved road cut across their path. A withered old woman dressed in rags could be seen wandering just at the road's edge, wringing her hands.

"Help me cross," the woman moaned. "I fear the rush of water."

"Some witless engineers from the previous regime filled it in," Doom told Loki, who leaned down and sniffed the road, and then laid his ear against the dull pavement.

"I don't hear it," Loki said as he straightened. "Too much of the sound of wheels and hooves and feet."

"Help me cross," the woman said again, reaching for the hem of Doom's cloak. He pulled it away before her fingers could snag the fabric. Doom indicated the road. "I am going to have it torn up and the stream restored after my current slate of projects have been completed."

"Oh?"

"Help me cross," the woman said for a third time. When she received no response, her expression soured. Doom raised a hand before she could speak.

"Where are you headed, grandmother?"

"The churchyard over the hill," the old woman answered.

"What will you do there, grandmother?"

"Be buried beside my sweetheart."

"Who shall carry you, grandmother?"

"A child of flesh and blood, or his soul be forfeit."

"Then be at rest until my return," Doom said, taking out a long pin from under his cloak and pushing it through one of the woman's big toes securely into the ground. "I will carry you across the water."

The old woman grumbled that it would not be too soon, but disappeared from view. Rust immediately, albeit slowly, began to form on the head of the pin, like a fungus.

"Gallant," Loki said.

"It is only that we have a superabundance of these," Doom stated. "I determined that interference from ghostly phenomena ranks eight on a list of Latveria's top ten obstacles to increasing its prosperity levels."

"What are obstacles one through seven, pray tell?"

"Wrongheaded resistance to Doom's rule."

"Ah," Loki said. "Where are we going next?"

"Quiet," Doom told him. He stepped onto the road and made his way north, walking along the bank where weeds poked through and the occasional cricket jumped across their path, startled out of his courtship ballad. An autumnal wind rustled through the dense forest on either side of the road. The moon was rising when they reached a crossroads, deserted except for the glow of the fireflies and the antiquated electric signals. At Doom's entry the artificial lights went out, but the insects burned brighter, their color blanching into a pure white that cast no shadow. The roughly paved road shone like just-polished bronze. Doom stopped at the center of the crossroads, took out a sealed glass bulb, and smashed it against the road. Ash flew out. Loki skipped out of the way of the swirling cloud and shielded his face.

"Are you sure that y—"

Doom took out the hen and tossed it down. It squawked awake and pecked at the broken bone bits in the ash. For every fragment the hen swallowed the ground trembled. It crowed like a rooster when it had ingested all the pieces.

"Arise, dark fiend," Doom intoned. He waited. The hen scratched at the ash. Loki shifted his weight from one foot to another. He opened his mouth to speak and Doom said, "_Get up_."

The surface of the pavement shuddered and burst, throwing up clods of dirt. The hen flew up onto Doom's injured shoulder, and he shook it off, his gaze fixed on the center of the crossroads where a gash had opened up. A pale arm hooked itself over the crevice. A shoulder mottled with purple followed, then a hairless head akin to a twisted bedframe stretched over with clammy skin and otherwise full of too-long, rotten teeth. It turned its red eyes toward Doom.

"Leave this hallowed place and remove your execrable corpse from my sight," Doom said.

The monstrous being looked to him, then to Loki, and then back in confusion. When it did not move, Doom seized it by the scruff of the neck and pulled it out of the opened grave. It screamed, flesh burning and curling away in blackened swathes from the iron. Doom flung it down and it scrambled out of the circles of the streetlights into the forest, still screaming. The hen waddled after it, clucking.

Loki raised an eyebrow.

"I have need of this location," Doom simply said. He picked up the straw basket that he had discarded a moment ago and tore it methodically apart to strew it over the broken pavement. The pieces burned as soon as they hit the ground, emitting an eerie blue light before dissolving into ether. "I will re-imprison the blooddrinker after I am finished."

"It's easier to break such things out than to put them back in."

"Elementary."

Loki peered into the vacated rift in the middle of the road. "I think I see an undead hound," he said. Doom went past him and back toward the woods without a backward glance.

"Too bad you cannot fashion a product out of your country's ghosts," Loki mused, hurrying after Doom into the brush and splashing needlessly as he cut through the outflow from a storm drain.

"As a matter of fact one of our main exports is highly trained mercenaries. It is the other way around—they return," Doom said, sweeping low-lying branches out of the way.

Loki caught up to him and waggled his eyebrows.

"Think about it," he said.

Doom thought about it.

"That is outrageous."

"Dreadful."

"Without question," Doom said. He leveled a look at Loki. "It could be done."

"You could."

Doom mulled the suggestion over while they pushed on through the forest and onto another scarce-traveled path, this one paved with Roman bricks. At regular intervals along the way, Doom stopped to pick weeds and tie blades of grass into knots, which he then threw over his shoulders. One particular loop of grass, he put on his thumb like a ring.

The old road ended in a patch of grass at the rear of the villa that marked the beginning of a broad, unplanted tract that led up to the building. They had completed the counterclockwise circuit back to the villa as the sun was just cresting over the far mountains; Doom called for a stop again. Fog streamed across the bare earth. A ferry passed, the helmsman shrouded in shadow. Jangling like that of coins being counted and counted again passed them by, a writhing snake of a sound. The fog streamed away and a figure wreathed in the plum, rose and ivory light of sunrise staggered before them, legs bowed from the weight of the small boulder that it carried.

"I carry it," the man said. Every vertebra strained against the material of his shirt as he stumbled back and forth. Sweat poured down his face and veins as thick as ropes corded his arms and legs. His fingernails were gone, fallen off from the pressure of gripping the stone. The light through him shone an anemic gold.

"You are guilty of moving that boundary stone," Doom said.

"I remember it," the man sadly replied.

"This land belongs to me now, and for all time," Doom told the ghost. "I will absolve you of your crime if you answer me this."

"I speak it."

Doom leaned and whispered into his ear. The man tossed the stone aside. A crash rent the early morning. He said: "Mouth will cut with salt and blood bloom up, and the souls were knelling." At that moment the sun cleared the mountains; the ghost vanished. Satisfied, Doom inspected the weatherworn boulder that had been left behind. In all respects it looked like a part of the landscape that had always been there. Loki scraped some of the moss from it with a thumbnail and tasted it on his tongue. He chewed it as a cow would cud and then spat it out.

"You've imposed a great deal of order this night. Your enemies would be impressed."

Doom paused. "Of course they would," he said.

"I'm impressed."

"Attempt your utmost to refrain from feeling that you must humor me," Doom said.

"No, I was right just then, too. I am going to keep you in mind."

"A dire fate."

"Anyway, you've given me an idea. On edificing."

"I do not want to hear of it," Doom said as he walked past Loki towards the villa.

"You live in a landlocked country, but they would be easy enough to pilfer. Every shipwrecked shore has them," Loki continued. "Gather caulk spirits by the dozens, lash each to a machine heart—"

"Spirits are unreliable," Doom interrupted. "Unsuited to the exquisite precision of my masterworks."

"Those souls are afflicted with individual character and changeable will, it's true," Loki said, deflating. "They're a cantankerous, capricious bunch. They would not bend easily to the command of even a powerful sorcerer."

"I could govern them," Doom said dismissively. "But they do not suit my immediate purpose."

Loki nodded. An air of disappointment hung about him.

"I like the mercenary idea, however," Doom conceded. "You know as well as I that it is nearly impossible to delegate the work. Certain specializations would be altogether ideal..."

Doom continued muttering as he went into the villa. There was a courtyard, a garden full of linden trees at the building's rear. A flock of sparrows, lodged on the branches and fast asleep, stirred when Doom walked by, but chirped at the sound of Loki's steps. "I'll not trouble them," he said reassuringly at Doom's warning look. "I'll not abandon you to the vicissitudes of time," Loki added, weaving in and out through the trees.

"That is nothing new. You are a constant pest."

"Nothing is new," Loki said, distant. "Not these small and numberless tasks. The horror that you'll not be. Not anything. What is there left?"

"What we laid claim to," Doom replied. Loki murmured something too soft to hear. Returning to the workroom, Doom resumed his place at his bench and Loki's stomach growled. With a sigh, Doom got back up to go to a corner that held appliances in varying stages of disrepair and a wide sink full of unwashed dishes. Lifting the lid of an icebox, Doom rattled off a catalogue of its edible contents. "Honey, camembert, celery, gherkins, terrine of trout."

Loki looked over the food and then expectantly at Doom, who said, "You are not welcome at my table. Take something and be on your way."

Loki pulled a petulant face. "I do believe you are the most ill-mannered person I have ever met."

"I— _ill-mannered_— when _you_—"

Loki fished out a stick of celery, chomped off a big piece and began to chew. "Thanks, in any case." He scrutinized the implements and materials that Doom had laid out all around the room. "Looks promising this time around," he commented.

Doom surveyed the effigies, precipitates, phosphorescing shells, fluted edges of the tin bowl inscribed with archaic signs. Everything that was his to offer for hisdead. Awareness enclosed him in the wellsprings of power that he had been cultivating for decades now, strung him across the ley-lines of every part of his realm, reminded him of the rows or vials containing his own blood, drawn, treated, and stored cold for the past year, all for the sake of a single night. The untold deals he had struck with the land's native dead, the countless services rendered unto them in exchange for tidbits of knowledge and piecemeal aid, all of those deeds mapped for Doom a wide clear path toward his triumph, however bittersweet.

"This year it will not end in a draw," he said with quiet confidence. "Everything will be different."

Loki gazed at him a while.

"You always say the dearest things," he said.

Doom cleared his throat and ordered him out.

•••••


	3. III

III.

A winter sky burned blue-white above the mountain peaks. Snow silvered the branches of the pines and the tall parapets of a dark gray castle that belonged to Latveria's despotic ruler. The windows of the castle were resplendent with treasures: panes of opal cut into diamonds, with silver fittings; others were of glass woven through with fibers for carrying electrical signals as well as curses. Loki drew back his head to take in the soaring towers and the imposing ramparts. He floated himself across a dry moat, fixed with jagged spikes and picturesque skeletons, and knocked on the gates. He jumped back as the owner of the castle materialized.

"Doom is otherwise occupied," Doom said, standing resolutely before the castle gates. "Doom—"

"It's one of those tiresome robots," a voice called from overhead.

"How dare you call Doom a ro—"

The head went flying from a magical blast. Wires from the neck frizzled in the snow and the eyes dimmed. The body toppled over, flailing, and then stilled. "How dare—how dare—how dare—" the head continued to say, until another blast smashed it into pieces against the gate. Loki leapt through the haze from the blast onto an iron spur that jetted out from the wall and jumped onto the rampart. He dodged a laser cannon and jumped towards another wall, phasing through the stone, Ikol flying right behind. He called for a fire to eat through the deadly wires that lay across the long entry that led to the castle's throne room, blew out the inner gates with another fireball, and ran through the smoking debris towards the dais.

"Did you really send a Doombot to tell me you weren't home?" Loki demanded when he had reached the empty throne room. "After all the years we must have known each other!"

"Now I will have to do this myself, thanks for nothing," Doom's disembodied voice echoed from every direction. A panel in the wall behind the dais slid open, revealing Doom. He raised a gauntleted hand.

"Leave at once, or I will rend you into innumerable pieces," Doom commanded in a tone that promised pain and terror. Loki simply walked back and forth. He looked Doom up and down with a skeptical eye.

"Leave, at once!"

"Something is the matter with you."

Doom tossed him a look of utter disdain. "Obviously I have nothing to discuss with _children_. Now be gone. I am very busy."

"Imposter," Ikol trilled, and dove at Doom's head. Doom threw up his arms and tried to knock the magpie out of the air. Loki tackled him to the ground and drew his knife and sliced it across the robot's neck. Sparks flew out of the wound and Doom clutched his throat. "Impudent rascal—"

"That's enough!" Loki said. He threw a handful of fire at the robot, melting it into an ugly lump of metal and silicon. "Have the guts to come out and speak with me face to face, coward!"

Another panel in the wall slid open. A dark haired, dark-eyed boy wearing several pieces of too-large armor and clutching a large, leatherbound volume rushed out. "Doom is no coward!" he yelled. "You will pay for that!"

Loki stared at the furious boy, flabbergasted. "But I heard Thor say that you were a loathsome miscreant just past the prime of his life."

The boy gaped, turning red. "He said what?"

"You're a kid!"

"I am Victor von Doom! And you are a kid yourself!" Victor shouted. "Get out of here!"

Frowning, Loki sat up and dusted off his knees. "Why are you a kid?"

Victor fumed. He waved the dogeared book in Loki's face. "It is all your fault and you do not even have the decency to remember how completely you have wronged Doom. All the time!"

"I'm sorry," Loki said, standing awkwardly over the wrecked Doombot. "I seem to have wronged a great many people."

Victor yelled incoherently. "Who cares about those rabble? Eternal life! Fountain of eternal life, you said, you unmitigated scoundrel!"

"I distinctly recall 'eternal youth,'" Ikol demurred from the safety of the rafters.

"I had finally purified the sample I secured all those years ago," Victor continued in great indignation, "and verified its properties, and ensured its mystical efficacy, and then...!"

"And then?" Loki asked, rapt.

"I find that I have turned myself into a child, you invade my home, ruin everything!"

"So you have," Loki said. " I did. And that is by all accounts true. But if you don't like it, why don't you just change yourself back?"

"...on the cusp of figuring out the trick," Victor mumbled in reply. Loki paused. He circled around, staring. Victor bore it stoically and with scarlet ears.

"You're stuck!" Loki marveled, striking his fist into his palm.

"And you had better keep your mouth shut about it," Victor said, attempting to tower over Loki and only succeeding in making him laugh out loud.

"My silence comes at a price," he said.

"I will give you a price, right in your nose," Victor growled. He looked uncertain and frightened for a split second.

"I won't tell," Loki promised. Victor looked at him suspiciously.

"What do you want? Why did you come here in the first place?"

Loki put on a friendly expression. "I really came over to steal something."

"Like what?"

"Anything," Loki remarked. He wandered over to the throne to examine the crystals that festooned it and a carved detail that had caught his eye. Ikol fluttered down and hopped about the Doombot, turning over burnt microprocessors and misshapen plastic fragments with his beak.

Victor rolled his eyes. "Typical."

"Is it?" Loki asked. "Already I am glad to have come here, and met you—"

"Flattery will not save you from my wrath."

"—though I cannot be glad of your apparel."

"What is wrong with my armor?"

"It looks a bit silly on account of you being so short," Loki said.

In spite of his bluster earlier, Victor drooped. "If even _you_ think that, then no one will take me seriously."

Loki was somewhat offended by what was being insinuated, but said, "That doesn't sound that bad."

"That's not th— Reed will never fight me again," Victor said, horror dawning.

"But you can fight him."

"But _he_ wouldn't," Victor said. All of a sudden he hurled the book across the room. Breathing unsteadily, with armor loudly creaking, he ran over to the book and kicked it further. Loki looked on, baffled.

"Won't he underestimate you out of misplaced compassion? Then you could spoil his work and crush his spirit unhindered."

"_Reed_—"

"He would still fight a Doombot," Loki said, then at Victor's apoplectic look, contritely added, "but it wouldn't be the same." Loki thought for a moment. Ikol flew down and landed on his head, saying, "The effect probably isn't permanent."

"I am going to be a scrawny adolescent for _thousands of years_."

Loki thought some more while Ikol arranged his wings and Victor silently stewed. "In that case, it might be faster for you to destroy your present form, render your spirit anew, and grow up in the regular manner," Loki said.

Victor just looked at him.

"Reed Richards would still be around for you to torment. He seems like the type to live to a ripe old age."

Victor swayed slightly. His hands twitched.

"...On account of his safe and conventional occupation of being a superhero."

Victor stumbled to the dais and sat down. "I apologize for my uncouth behavior up to this point of our unfortunate meeting which follows the usual custom," he said faintly. "Hormones."

"Yeah, I have them too," Loki said, trying to sound supportive. Victor clutched his head.

"For what it's worth, I heard Thor also say that you are no ordinary foe."

"I am still going to beat him to a pulp," Victor mumbled into the tiles. He took a deep breath and sat up, shaking his hair out of his eyes. "Take whatever it is you came for and _go away_," he said.

"Steal, you mean."

"This instant!"

Loki pondered that for a moment. He brightened. "I'll steal you."

Victor squawked. "Are you not at all planning to help me return to my normal self?"

"I will later, if you like," Loki said. "But there's something I have to do first."

"What can possibly be more important?"

"A pivot kind of thing. I was on my way to a land of well-fed eagles and wanted to see if you had something that I might use," Loki replied, and then paused. "I see why... Though now I think it might not be a good idea to bring you along. It's bound to be dangerous."

"No danger is too great for Doom," Victor said.

"I _have_ heard it said that you may be one of the greatest sorcerers to have ever lived."

"I am_ the_ greatest sorcerer to have ever lived," Victor declared. Loki agreed in no uncertain terms that the oversized armor only burnished the truth of the statement and spent the next five minutes cajoling Victor back out from behind the throne. Victor threw off the armor regardless and had it put away, and in a tunic and leggings and the green cloak, he summoned a housekeeping robot and savagely cut the cloak down to size with the shears that it offered up.

"My boots are still too big," Victor said as he pulled them back on. The rest of his clothes had already been adjusted. "But the color will run if I re-do these spells."

"Let me," Loki said, but Victor shooed him away and shrunk the boots down to size. "Which is not important. But I need my mask," he said.

"It's not somewhere you travel to, really."

"I cannot go without my mask nonetheless," Victor insisted.

"But you are very handsome."

Victor's ears reddened. "I'm not. I was, but not anymore. I was, but he, I—" He looked at Loki with a crazed light in his eyes. "Mirror."

Ikol hopped down to Loki's shoulder to whisper urgently in his ear. "We'll be here until the stars go out if he gets a hold of one in that state." Hurriedly Loki went to Victor's side.

"You don't want anyone else to know about this, isn't that right? People would ask questions if you appeared as Dr. Doom. Having no mask _is_ a mask. And it would be a shame to have to cover up your face."

Victor flinched and shivered with sudden fury. "If I were as I was, you would recoil in disgust," he said, voice rising to a shriek. "You, who never—"

"I don't see why I would ever care," Loki snapped in annoyance. "I see you as you are," he said, full of scorn. "A brat."

"What do you know," Victor snarled.

"I know enough to know that you don't, either," Loki retorted, then went quiet. Victor boggled. Words stuck in his throat. Loki watched him struggle to keep his composure, then sighed and said, "But it _will_ be different. You know?"

Victor let out a pent-up breath. "Fine," he muttered, but insisted on drawing the hood of his cloak down as far as it would go, so that most of his face lay hidden. He took them up to the observatory, where he had another robot bring up chalk and a bucket of clean sand per Loki's instructions. Ikol perched on the arm of one of the telescopes and started cleaning his feathers; Loki fluttered about the observatory apparatuses and the blackboards and glass cases, enchanted.

"What's that?"

"What do you mean, you were the one who—" Victor started to say, then flushed. "The branch of a tree that I developed. It bears apples full of poison. I am going to use those cuttings to hybridize it with—"

"What is this?"

"My time-travel device," Victor said proudly. Loki oohed. "You could travel back and stop yourself from taking that draught," he said.

"I am still out of sorts with time," Victor said, rejecting the suggestion. "The central warpage must be recast and it is such a bother, to prepare last time I had to—" He grimaced. "Aligned to multiply, you can hardly imagine. The non-integers. They made a mess and I had to do away with the lot of them. It was weeks cleaning up, and the smell... I was close though, that last time. If not for those—spurn _me_, would they—" Victor shuddered. "I do not like this," he said. "I never. This."

"You look like you're washing your face with a porcupine."

Victor scrubbed his face with his hands. "Oh, shut up."

"That's better," Loki said. "Hand me some chalk. Let's kindle it here."

Victor threw the chalk at Loki who caught it easily, and they spent several minutes diagramming a one-way portal on the floor. Midway Victor opened the roof to let in a crisp breeze and the daylight. When they were near finished, he and Loki took handfuls of the sand and sprinkled it over the cardinal points and at the center, making little heaps. Victor inspected the symbols that Loki was marking into the portal's inside ring, took his piece of chalk away to make a correction, and furrowed his brows when Loki retrieved it to write in the finishing sign. "The sunward star is in retrograde," Victor said, dusting off his fingers on his cloak. "If that," he pointed, "is your intention, we should be doing this at night, with the moon waxing."

"I mustn't wait," Loki said. Victor shook his head. "Then the crossing will cost us," he said, and raised a warning finger. "You are not going to bleed me for some trivial enterprise."

"What about my heart's desire?" Loki asked, squinting as he looked up from where he was kneeling. Victor was silhouetted by the morning sun, and he only snorted in derision. "You have so many, where would we even begin?"

"Just a splash, then. For my life's preposterous dream," Loki said, opening his left hand and raising it, palm up. Ikol flew to his shoulder and stared unblinkingly at Victor. Victor groused at them both. Yet he gave his left hand over, and with his other hand Loki drew his knife over the tendons of the wrist and sliced it cleanly open. The blood poured down into the pile of sand at the center of the portal. The sand that were weighing down the four corners darkened, and then crumbled, and then ran, clockwise in four little rivulets, around the perimeter of the circle they had marked with chalk. The moment each stream of blood caught up to its neighbor, the circle flashed blue. An upsurge of energy engulfed the portal and carried it up, like an out of control fire roaring up a chimney, and catapulted the two boys into a snow-laden hillside at the edge of a sea glazed over with fresh cold.

Victor climbed out of the snowbank first, holding his injured hand close to his chest. Loki clambered out after him and shook snow from his clothes. Ikol sneezed and flew up, and up, and quickly out of sight. Wordlessly Loki took out a strip of cloth and bound up Victor's wrist. He spat on it once and made a healing sign.

"Where has your bird gone?" Victor asked, shielding his eyes against the harsh light. His mountains, forests, and castle had gone, and in their place were endless hillocks and the shores of a vast body of water. The nearly white sky was clear except for a plume of black clouds, curled like a dragon in mid-flight. Far across the sea, he saw the shadow of a landmass, and down where the snow crusted into ice, a quay of black crystal.

"Hanging out with the wind, I'm sure." Loki answered. He slid down the hillside to the dock, walked to its edge and waved his arms at a far-off shadow moving slowly over the waves. Victor brushed snow from his cloak, pulled the hood down, hunched his shoulders, and joined Loki at the land's edge. A long, low ship slung with a single piece of cloth, as delicate as gossamer, approached. The ferryman put out his long pole and gently maneuvered the craft to a stop.

"I've seen you," he said to Victor in a gravely voice. "You looked taller then."

Victor spluttered and turned and shoved Loki, who tried not to laugh, but not very hard. Fending off Victor's angry flailing at the same time, Loki hooked his arms around one of Victor's and swung him around, spinning the two of them towards the boat.

"We want to sail to the isle. The inhabited part," he said to the ferryman. The ferryman nodded his gray bearded head and motioned for them to board. Loki pulled Victor onto the deck, the wood worn so smooth that it was impossible to tell what color it had once been, and as soon as their feet cleared the quay, the ferryman pushed off from the shore and adjusted the halyard to capture a breeze. The ferry glided smoothly over the thicker ice near the shore, quietly carved through the thin, translucent layer further out, then floated leisurely over the open water. Loki went to sit cross-legged near the stern. Ikol drifted down and took up his place next to him.

"What about the fare?" Victor whispered to Loki as he came by to sit next to Ikol. Loki pointed over to the side. There an orange goldfish swam, glimmering just under the waves that gently curved around the boat. The one-of-a-kind shade of the fish was one that Victor recognized.

"Another one of those fickle paths?"

Ikol answered him. "The ferryman feeds it with alms, so." Over the side of the ferry Loki swung his legs and added, "Nicer than tender," making Victor punch his shoulder for the pun.

"But I came aboard empty-handed," he said.

"You put that boundary stone to rights and fixed a bend in the river," Ikol said. "It counts as a favor."

"That was not what I was doing," Victor protested.

Ikol fluffed his wings. "Still counts."

"Rotten louse. And people have the gall to say you have changed."

"Just as well Loki did not die, what with his foul reputation unscathed," Ikol sarcastically responded.

"You did die."

"I journeyed, that's all," Loki replied in the magpie's stead. Ikol hopped to his shoulder, judged it too exposed, and hopped down to hunch in between them as the wind picked up. Victor wrapped his cloak more tightly around himself and considered the statement with equal parts aversion and curiosity.

"There were things you must have seen. The loom? The branching fates? One of the wells, surely."

Loki shrugged, sheepish. "I don't quite remember." Ikol just buried his head under a wing.

"Then will you go again?"

"Who knows what kind of bird I am?"

"Most likely of a species called Trouble," Ikol said, his eyes closed.

"Yes!" Victor shouted, slapping the side of the ferry for emphasis. "That is it exactly."

Loki gazed woundedly at them both. "I am not talking to you until we land."

The remainder of the trip was spent in a silence, oddly comfortable, even though the wind was sharp as a blade and the spray from the sea as brittle as ice. When they had passed the deep water the ferryman slowed to lean over the side; from the heavy pouch that hung from his belt he took out handfuls of money in all shapes and sizes—galleons, drachmas, bronze axes, white shells, plastic chits and paper notes, some printed with numbers and letters and portraits, others painted with lacquer and sprinkled with the dust of precious stones—to scatter over the side of the boat. They sank very slowly. Strange fish that looked like they would have been more at home around an underwater trench came up to the boat, but did not go near the ferryman's offerings. They only seemed curious but one fish, as clear as a bubble and at least as big as an elephant, pulled itself in closer to eye the two children. Loki discreetly pulled his legs up from where they had been hanging over the side and Victor scooted a little further back on the slippery deck. The fish scattered and melted back into the dark blue depths when a pretty seagoing serpent, lurid and lithe, came up to the ferry. It swallowed a few of the coins, pleasing the ferryman; a fleeting smile passed over his wrinkled gray face. The serpent saved the goldfish for the very end and then swam away, sated. It seemed to Victor then that Ikol sighed a little.

Soon the island drifted into view, a hazy smudge on the horizon. The ferry drew up to a beach littered with headless stone statues and disintegrating arms from every era buried the pale sand. The ferryman kindly pushed his craft up to the very edge of the sea, so that neither Victor nor Loki got even their feet wet. Loki and Ikol did not look back, but Victor turned and thanked the ferryman, his manner stiff and formal from habit but also the chill. The ferryman tipped his broad-rimmed hat and pushed off, singing a dirge. A tremor rolled through Victor's limbs; he turned to hurry after Loki.

"Watch your feet," Ikol called out to Victor from above. Loki had already made it to where the sand met vegetation, mostly clumps of tall grasses, but shading those, trees with leaves dark, green, and embroidered with spiderwebs and dew. The wild plants gave way to overgrown hedges and low crumbling walls the further Loki and Victor made their way inland. They climbed over them, earning only scratches for their trouble, and more than once tripped over the rams' skulls scattered about the stony fields that lay between the abandoned remains. Victor was growing increasingly cold and tired and hungry.

"Inhabited by what?" he asked, suddenly remembering.

"You should've asked earlier," Loki said, pointing behind him. Victor felt the rush of air and instinctively dropped to his feet, staying that way for a moment too long because of light-headedness, and scrambled forward into a run next to Loki. Victor spared a glance back to see the statues steadily pursuing them, their broken weapons raised high.

"And more," Ikol said, flying in close and then swooping away. "Be wary."

Victor slowed after a bit and Loki doubled back to walk next to him.

"They are stupidly slow," Victor said. He wiped the sweat from his face with a corner of his cloak, which now sported an impressively diverse collection of sticks, leaves, and brambles. He picked a few of the bigger pieces off and threw them behind him, where they unwound into coils of ropes.

"But they won't get fatigued, so we should keep moving," Loki said. "Will that stop them?"

Victor watched one statue go down, its legs tangled up when the ropes came alive. A handful of statues fell and seemed not to be able to get back up, but there were hundreds, if not thousands, marching towards them.

"Oh yeah, we totally owned those guys," Loki said. Victor set his jaw and picked up the pace. It was unclear which direction they were going, for the sun appeared in one part of the sky one moment, and another in the next, but increasing signs of habitation, of a sort, could be seen. Once they had leapt over a thin line of running water they breathed out a sigh of relief. Victor made a pile of dirt and stone there just in case—Loki made for it a necklace of grass—and admonished it to give no quarter should the statues somehow cross the stream. Behind the next rise they found a settlement with tools lying all about, the place apparently abandoned in haste. They paused to rest behind a huddle of huts made of stone. The roofs were finished with turf; over half of them had collapsed, though the cause was unclear. Ikol strutted through the grass, searching for worms.

"What are we even doing here?" Victor asked. "Let me rephrase that: what is it that _you_ are doing here?"

"Making honorable amends," Loki replied. Victor barked out a laugh.

"It's true," Loki said hotly. Victor just sneered and threw a tuft of grass at Ikol, and when that got him no response, the fragment of a flint he had found. "Really?

"Be nice to Ikol!"

"You ought to be nice to _me_," Victor said.

"I would, if you weren't being a giant turd," Loki said.

"A barefaced liar like you! Calling me a, a—"

"This is the problem with children," Ikol cut in. He had found only the shell of a beetle and was rolling it around with a claw, forlorn. "You don't play at being cruel, you just really are."

"There you are again, talking up needless mysteries," Victor complained.

"It's no mystery. Grown-ups think they know what being cruel is," Ikol said patiently. "They come to believe that they know. It becomes like anything else, a game. But children know otherwise and only unlearn the real thing after they've been at time's trough."

Loki tipped his head to one side. Victor just rubbed his temples. "I really wish you had rethought your decision to disturb my existence yet again."

Ikol cawed and Loki laughed under his breath. Ikol began, "We did consider raiding arcana from Stephen Strange—"

"Ha! As if you could!" Victor said, speaking from firsthand experience.

"—but yeah, discouraged by circumstances. Still an idea, though," Loki finished.

"He would _blight_ us," Victor said.

Loki nodded. "It would be pretty awesome."

Victor grudgingly agreed. He searched the horizon behind them, but no more statues came into view. They resumed their walk inland and in the next abandoned hamlet, bigger than the one before, found haystacks and carts ringing the houses. In the common area shared by the hovels they came across spare axles and wheels, empty leashes, and a firepit just recently extinguished with a roast plover, cold on the spit, and ortolans baked in some ruddy clay. The charred roots that Loki dug up from the ashes were as hard as rocks. Victor pulled off a few strands of still edible meat from the roast birds and offered Loki a handful. They sat in a silence made strenuous by the chewing and pointed out likely places that Ikol might find insects or grub. He gave up after a while and perched on Loki's shoulder.

"Probably we should not be eating food from a country of the dead," Victor commented.

"Someone should say something," Loki said loudly. Nothing happened. He turned to Victor and shrugged. "If anyone makes a big deal out of it, let's just kick their asses."

"All right."

The next village was one of farriers; they found empty bridles and saddles, tongs, large files, pincers, skeins of rope, and horse dung. The lack of flies bothered Victor the most, Loki, the dearth of worn horseshoes. Ikol left it still hungry. The next habitation was a small town, also abandoned. The buildings were taller, and there was a courtyard at the center with a small fountain with ivory bowls and ladles. They drank their fill and explored the town—several of the houses were just burnt-out frames but many stood undamaged, some with a key still in the door. Walking the streets they heard weeping and breaking crockery, the sounds of things being packed up too quickly and the stamping of running feet; from inside the houses they heard shouts from the outside, the crackling of fire, and the clashing of shields and horses' screams, interspersed by short, eerie bursts of silence.

One of the largest houses was stuffed with rich carpets and crates. Loki enlisted Victor's help to open the bundles and boxes; they uncovered enameled vases wrapped up with coverlets of swansdown and griffinsdown and jars of what turned out to be soot of different fragrant woods. Dissatisfied, Loki took them to the next house, where all the rooms were spotlessly clean. The kitchen had a tympan instead of a table, but when thumped, the drum made no sound. The next town was similarly disappointing, though filled with dazzling goods, and still no people.

"I tire of this," Victor said as they left yet another town. His feet dragged over the rough surface of the road that connected one place to the next. "What are we even looking for in a place so cheerless that even its own dead have deserted it?" His eyes narrowed. "What are you putting off doing?"

"There aren't any trees here, have you noticed?" Loki remarked instead of answering. Ikol lay in his arms, but asleep or weak from hunger, Victor could not tell.

"Yes, I have noticed," he grumbled. "As well as our time wasting. But the sun does not burn, so what of it?"

"Maybe it wasn't this one," Loki said, searching the horizon.

"Are we looking for a tree?"

"It could have been a tree by now, I should think," Ikol mumbled, his eyes still closed. "When it is cut..."

"No. We'll go this way," Loki said. Victor held out an arm and kept him in place.

"You were better at this before," he said critically. "I would never have thought that you would rely on a gambit as foolhardy as a separable soul."

"Those must have been times that I was not afraid."

"Being afraid never stopped you from doing stupid things," Victor reminded him.

"From what people say, nothing about me before was good."

"I liked the helmet," Victor said with genuine feeling. "It was grand."

Loki quirked his lips. "I don't know what to do," he confessed. "The answer isn't to be destroyed or saved or even to be remade. It might be something far more terrible... I shouldn't have brought you here."

Victor released his grip on Loki's arm. "I would rather brave your unmerciful care if the alternative is to be ruth and disfavor." He paused to reflect on what he had just said. "It has always been so."

"That sucks," Loki said in an odd voice, caught between sympathy and mirth.

"Come on," Victor said, leading the way. "There is a tree. But it grows down, not up."

They reached the final town on the road and walked through the gates, which had been left open. There were markets every couple of streets, crammed with rich cloths, blown glass, and sacks of pungent, vivid spices. The dust underfoot still retained the imprint of feet.

"What happened to this island?" Victor asked as entered the citadel at the town's center. Loki patted Ikol on the head, rousing him from his stupor.

"Everyone left when they realized that they could," Ikol muttered sleepily. "When the fog is lifted there will no more borders to keep, no more reasons for graves. Even the countries of the dead someday empty. Just like this."

"Those soldiers, though," Loki said.

"Those who would make war, make war," Ikol said. "Neither invention nor truth will ever deter them."

"Hm."

"This is the lowest point," Victor said, crouching down and pressing a palm against the earth. The citadel's walls rose up all around them like lace, every door and every window open to the air.

"We don't want the roots," Loki said, looking up all around at the invisible, "and not the freshest light, either, before it is touched by the highest leaves." He looked down. "We don't want to jostle the branches or knock anything out of orbit." He rapped his knuckles against the ground, testing it. "We don't want the sweetness of the pith."

"Just a broken twig," Victor muttered. "By any chance did you..."

"Oops. You remember?"

Victor stared at Loki in horrified fascination. "Did you in fact leave it _attached_?"

"Not the greatest aide-memoire, huh," Loki said. "Just partly. I think?" He cradled Ikol against him and pushed his fingers into the dirt. He ran them along what he found just below the surface. "It's served its purpose. Not to live, or die, or live again, but to be wrest away once and for all and be unmoored—"

"Stay where you are, Loki Laufeyson!" Victor yelled. "Or I swear—"

"—and even the scar be erased—"

Ikol's voice echoed from somewhere far away. "Strike only once!"

Victor seized Loki's other wrist, the one in the air, and yanked him bodily up. In the next instant the world blurred red—blurred into a stripe of red, as fresh as the day it had been rubbed into the altar at the apex of the universe. The color flooded his nose and mouth and stained the sky. The dragon-shaped cloud pinning it up against the firmament wavered. Lights flashed across his vision. Victor blinked his eyes open and saw Loki peering down at him.

"I understand now," Victor said. "You need time to grow nerves fine enough to register the pain."

"That's what I hear."

"Great heroic warriors of old had three ribcages, each nestled inside the other," Victor went on. "To house their three hearts. And the snake asleep on the third."

"But you're a pompous, evil, ass," Loki said, helplessly laughing, his hands full of Victor's blood.

"Oh, damn," Victor said, tasting it bubbling up out of his throat.

"It doesn't look that bad," Loki told him.

"I have suffered worse by you," Victor said. The words sounded strange and slurred. On Loki's shoulder Ikol nodded. Loki made a face. "Dude."

Victor sighed. "Yes. Dude. That about sums it up."

Loki made an even funnier face and shushed him. He cupped his hands and poured its contents over Victor's rent chest. They fell like a stream of sand.

"Don't interrupt a world-splintering affair next time, " Ikol advised Victor.

"It was stupid though."

"I would do anything," Loki said. "But that represented all I could."

"Would it have been sufficient?"

Loki folded his hands on his lap and sat back. "Maybe. It seemed like the better option."

Victor tried to sit up and decided lying down was great. "In comparison to what?"

"Than learning little sorrows, to steel your heart against the sorrow of a brother lost," Ikol said in reply.

"There aren't sorrows enough," Loki clarified.

"You will think of something better," Victor said, coughing. "And I am sure that it will be a horrendous thing indeed. I suppose I will need to build more doubles."

"Just say you're going on vacation."

"Ha."

"I would invite you," Loki said, a shade apologetic, "but my brother is sure to think you a bad influence."

"...Me."

"You've met my brother," Loki said. He became pensive. "What do you think of Thor? A delight, is he not?"

Victor contemplated the sky. There were as many things he could possibly say as there were stars in the night. At long last he laughed. "I think that he is forever supremely deserving."

Loki laughed, too. Victor looked up at him. "Does anyone even realize that you have only now become really, truly dangerous?"

"At least one, I think," he replied. "But he still loves me yet."

At the answer Victor groaned and buried his face in his cloak. "Kindred."

"O brotherless boy, may you someday be so plagued," Ikol said, piqued.

"A late curse is like no curse at all," Victor shot back. He rolled over and opened his eyes. "I feel awful."

"You look awful."

Victor knew the answer but asked him anyway. "In the end, what will it be for, do you think?"

Loki stood up and bent down to extend him a hand. Victor was reminded of death's unfading scent, the tidings that only ill winds bring, those lies that do not turn into truths but secure them in faith.

Victor gripped his hand. Loki pulled him up.

"Laurels for me, libations for you."

•••••

End


	4. iv

(1 of 3)

•••••

They walked to the shore, the side opposite their landing — or rather, Loki walked while Victor limped, leaning heavily on the arm propping him up by the shoulders. The skies were streaked with black smoke, and their lungs adraw with ash-filled air. Victor held up a corner of his cloak to his face and tried not to cough. In Loki's other arm lay Ikol. This thing, it was whispering — rumors and gossip, it seemed to Victor, not keys and not puzzles, in meandering, effervescent languages only vaguely familiar, most of it in registers beyond his ken. It had teeth, the bird, and a lizard tongue, and cat pupils, and it was no more a bird than Loki was a child, not like Victor was, becalmed in a raging ocean that was memory, what he had been and could only become again. Feathers fell, one by one, littered the path they stamped upon the glassy dust. Once in a while Loki would let out quiet laughs, sounds cottoned around some seed or curse. The echoes of the sound curled in Victor's ears, worms made of distant thunder.

"Am I owed you, or are you owed me?" Loki said out loud.

"Me," Victor said, stumbling through a many-tendriled pain, the word automatic, and he thought he saw Loki smile. Catching his eyes Ikol laughed, chidden. He flickered in and out of view, in time with Victor's consciousness flashing to and dark.

The graveled road leading out of the city crumbled into dirt, and then into clumps of matted grass that struck their ankles and shins as hard as rocks. They fought through a stretch of coarse, wiry thickets, only to suddenly find the ground beneath their feet soft, and fell gracelessly into the damp sand. The bird's body went rolling and stilled, wings and legs sticking out, crusted with silver grains. The whispering ceased, though their echoes remained, waiting, or so it seemed. Victor felt Loki slowly peel away and sit up and reach out. From the rustling he knew it was the bird in his hands. Victor's eyes fluttered closed. Fatigue crashed over him in like a tidal wave and suffused his entire being. The oceans gelled and time slowed; a long slither of it wound around him, the way snakes do for prey they hold dear.

"It was luck, to have shared the road with another so touched," Victor heard Loki say through the crunching of tiny, brittle bones. "Because it was mad, to think _I_ could—oh. Not so, then. That's right, we're no longer fortune-bound—" The scent reached him in curls like smoke, Loki's, too, the shards of the bird bloodying the inside of his mouth, his fingertips as he sucked the marrow dry. They were still conversing, though the sounds touched Victor less and less; the blood like any other was drying up in the wind full of stinging grit, everything together growing cold and silent, the fires receding, retiring, sleepily banking, the warmth arranging itself about all the worlds and their wounds as it pleased, revelling in some contrary nature, writing its own rules.

"Fare well, thou ghastly egomaniac," Victor heard him say. His eyes pulled reluctantly away from a black oblivion, turned instead to cloud-hazed light.

"Goodbye, you self-serving showboat," he said without particular venom.

"You're one to talk," Loki said, crashing back into the beach to lie prone. He choked a little but didn't spit.

"What now?"

"Mm."

Victor slowly sat up, digging his hands into the flesh of the beach. "I have to go home," he said. It was a simple utterance. A truth that a coward like Loki would never, could never utter, and he said so.

"I never had one," Loki said, unruffled, in that single moment invincible, then the straight line of his lips faltered and he hid his face in the crook of one arm. Victor swayed upright and kicked some sand in Loki's general direction.

"I hope you still remember that you are not welcome in mine."

"I remember."

Victor looked out across the ocean. It was as shallow as a dish at this end of the isle, or the floor could have risen in the time they had lain, time moved without care for laws here. He didn't like it, not at all. Victor looked up to see strange constellations creeping, black points against a dull white sky. He struggled to recall lessons and accidents of yore, before Loki's selfish gift had brought him here, in a form he did not remember liking, either. He had always wanted to be a grown-up. That was power, power was life, and life was meaning itself. He flexed his hands. The cold had hooked them into claws; Victor carefully unfolded them into a human shape. "What do you want to do?" he generously asked.

"I don't."

Victor snorted. "You want for useless foolhardy things," he said. "Always have."

"No one likes a know-it-all."

"Unlike some people, I do not need to be liked."

"And yet!"

Victor hummed under his breath. It could just have been shock, an illusion rendered from the pain and the cold, but regardless, he was feeling better, and he never wasted an opportunity. "Suit yourself. I will find my own way back," Victor said, self-assured. He looked out across the ocean again and thought he saw a thin gray line, land of some kind. He cautiously splashed into the water. Loki stayed where he was. "Stop being an ass," Victor told him. "You are embarrassing yourself."

"I'm not."

Victor waited patiently.

"I won't," Loki said, in almost a whisper, winding up something inside himself. Victor would have tsked if he had had energy to spare. Loki sat up all of a sudden and violently struck sand from his arms and legs. "Well?" he demanded.

"Hello, Loki," Victor replied. It pleased him to be kind, this one time. Their acquaintance was long enough for that, if he wished it, and he wished it. Loki made an ugly face at him, the knave. But he drew to his feet and obligingly walked with him into the water. It barely came up the top of their feet, but was thick with mud and debris. Victor led, in a way, but if not for Loki helping him he might have crawled most of the way. It was a long walk, but one unnaturally flat, and not empty of sights. First they saw only the carcasses of shellfish, piled like dunes, and blue-gray rocks stippled with dead coral, all churned up and topsy-turvy, but further out, their progress slowed as they encountered the skeletons of fabulous vast ships and monstrous whales alike, the giant curving bones petrified. Other treasures littered the whole of the raised and ironed-flat ocean floor, and under different circumstances Victor would have been sunk deep in some brilliant scheme to make proper use of such resources, but with Loki huffing by his side, it all just seemed like a colossal nuisance, or maybe it was simply that his feelings about Loki was spilling over to the unaffected parts of his brain. The prospect of that should have troubled him more, but Victor was rather tired. He hoped that it did not seem obvious, but it was unfortunately in vain.

"Mortal," Loki said.

"I thought you said it was eternal."

"You did something to it," Loki guessed. "Effects cannot be guaranteed in cases of tampering."

"Bah," Victor said. "Can you see the other shore?"

"I don't think it's anyplace living," Loki said, squinting at the far-off lump of gray. "But it seems closer than before."

The shelf of a continent, also silent, certain to have been styled a realm but with name unknown — it was vaguely familiar, but like anything else dead, Victor could not quite place it. "Time is not time here," he said, tasting it on his tongue, not salt but something burnt, when they set foot on the shore with mud clinging to their every surface. Loki just flung his arm off and grinned cheekily when Victor did not go down.

"Nothing is nothing here," he said, harsh.

Victor didn't answer. He scanned the sloping edge of land they found themselves on and pulled a protesting Loki behind him. They climbed. Like the isle here there was grass, unrelenting, but together they sheared a way, toward the ruins of something that might have been a palace once, a great building that stretched nearly out into the sea. Entering through one of the holes in the outer walls yielded up corridors, dimly lit and clear. Globules of auricalke were strewn everywhere, hung in unruly strands from the carved rafters of the halls. Where the halls opened up, they climbed again, and went over an overgrown earthen ramp, maybe an old fortification that had been built over. At the top of the hill were more structures that had seen better days, but otherwise only the passage of time, not war. They saw no weapons: no broken swords, no spearheads, no seige engine fittings, no incised bones. They passed under the shadow of a tremendous barbican, its deep passage once fitted with hundreds of gates, going by the grooves, and entered an expansive green whose raised center held dozens of triliths, scabbed over with lichens and stained with blood yet unfaded, though entirely ancient. At the clearing's center was a shattered bell, its chain still suspended from a beam astraddle trunnions, pillars made of mirror-black obsidian. Square caskets of the same material lay open all around in the expansive space, and a threadbare, black-haired girl, her back turned, sifted through them, hands floured with the dust of books, bones, the contents of the opened reliquaries. Victor stopped where he stood and gazed at her in astonishment. Loki went a step further and let out a stricken sound.

"Leah," he said.

•••••


	5. v

(2 of 3)

•••••

Loki stumbled towards her and then drew up sharply, as if he had struck a wall of glass, but it was rather that his nerve had faltered, and the object of his terror and want affix him with her gaze.

"I was here first," the girl, Leah, said. Loki would have been audacious but she was casual about it, truth. Her tone indicated to Victor that she would use it as a cudgel, not a scalpel and not a vise. It tangled in Loki a chain; on her it was a crown. Her hair was so long that it swept through the grass, that it had grown tangled over the gray pins in her hair. Victor could see the shape of her legs through her green dress, frayed to unraveling at the hems and the rest worn to tissue. Her hair spilled over her shoulders and chest, obscuring the view, but in any case her back was mostly turned to them, and Victor did not find this objectionable in the least. There was a sonorous quality to her voice as though she spoke from within a deep well. She seemed dangerous; as might have been expected, Victor found himself intrigued.

"You are always—" Loki started to say, and then clenched his hands into fists. "How long since I saw you last, Leah?"

"How long ago indeed, dear friend?" she inquired, and even as an outsider to their past Victor tasted the venom in _friend_, of a subtle and mature flavor squeezed from something overripe, crushed under time's wheels, already a ruin. Like the one they found themselves within—Victor recognized her handiwork suddenly, the strings of precious metal strewn all about, that were in fact crude calendars—this was her realm, whose name he was never more loath to utter than almost any other. His estimation of Loki went up slightly. He had to have done something truly odious to create hatred so deep and steadfast that it could have served as the foundation of a whole new universe.

Perhaps it had. And that gave him pause, especially in a place like this. From the fountain to the river's edge to the isle and through the oceans they had come all the way around; it was truly unnamed territory he was in. Victor had long ago abandoned any pretense of ceding to fear, but a shiver seized him when the girl turned to face them. Wordlessly she sat on the edge of one of the opened caskets. She folded her hands on her lap, expression open and grave, wild hair a black halo around her pale face. Beside him Loki swallowed. Victor vaguely wondered how he was to find the way back home from this, wondered even more vaguely if there was any advantage to be had in staying in this land, a place only fit for endings, though such a course was contrary to everything he felt to be right. It may not have been for him, nor perhaps Loki, but this girl, _Leah_—

"Your friend."

Loki broke off from staring at her and looked at him silently.

"No," Victor said, the very picture of understanding. "Ex."

Loki threw the first punch, and Victor, anticipating the blow, dodged it and shoved an elbow into his neck, intending to knock him back, but by the treachery of his abused lungs and weakened legs Victor found himself losing his balance, suddenly lightheaded. He overshot, allowing Loki to twist out of the way and tackle him to the ground. There ensued an undignified scuffle during which Loki, far from a fair fighter even on the best of days, scratched and bit, and Victor, although his inborn nobility of character, reflected in ironclad honor, lay beyond all worldly reproof, discovered that he was hungry and cold and irate and giving Loki a black eye seemed just the solution to all of life's problems and then some. From her seat, in complete stillness and silence, Leah watched them yelling and kicking up tufts of sod and lumps of grass. When they rolled near the fallen stone where she was currently sitting, Leah drew up her feet and arranged the tatters of her dress about her toes.

"This is my place. Not for you. I want you to leave," she said, calmly looking down. This close up, Victor could see that many of her nails were missing, the wounds fresh. She drew up an elegant hand and sheared off a remaining thumbnail with her incisors, dropped it beside her on the stone as neatly as a cat.

"I don't want anything of yours," Loki retorted, red-faced for a variety of reasons, as he shoved Victor's hand away from his face and kicked wildly. Pushing himself away to avoid Loki's feet, Victor tottered upright and leaned against the ice-cold stone and gave a kick of his own, missing his mark. His knees buckled again and his back hit the casket with a hard thump before he slid down onto his rear. A sharp, green-veiled knee lay just to his right. Loki sat up slowly, blood carving a channel on the dust from nostrils to chin.

"Leave," Leah repeated.

Loki didn't have anywhere to go to, Victor almost found himself saying, but he kept silent. He knew better than to ask, but Loki didn't, or didn't care, or both. Loki looked up at her, eyes wide with something that made him want to look away, something like despair but worse.

"What would you have me do? I know that you are angry with me—"

A laugh cut the air. "Is that what you know..."

Victor stiffened in alarm. He scrambled on hands and knees toward Loki, running to his feet, and pulled Loki up, away from the sudden upward rush of fire behind them. Above their heads the dull daytime stars began to flare, their light going haywire as the skies churned, westerly winds and vertical suns. The grass began to wilt and crackle. Victor lifted his head to see the line of columns at the clearing's edge, a grand colonnade set against a wing of the palace, not far from where they had entered.

"Inside," Victor said, tugging at Loki's arm.

"Leah—"

"Remove my name from your lips," she said. Loki shuddered as though he had been struck full on the face. "It belongs to me.

"This, too," Leah said, starting to burn from her eyes outward, as everything began to smolder. The dread feeling exploded without warning and the wind screamed up, a vortex of heat. Victor cursed as Loki yanked his arm out of his grip and fell forward.

"Leah, _Leah_," Loki cried, stumbling to his feet and running, tripping to fall sharply on his knees and then getting back up again, running again. Victor tackled him from behind and they rolled down the slope of the burning hill. Physically Loki was stronger than he was, but even he had to recoil from the heat, and it gave Victor enough leverage to pull him bodily up and backwards the rest of the way toward the portico. Victor shoved Loki up the stairs and collapsed against one of its basalt columns next to him. The coughs that shook him were thickly flecked; the corner of his cloak would have been sodden, if the air wasn't in the process of stealing all of the available moisture. His nose was starting to bleed, dry up, and then the capillaries rip to bleed again.

Next to him, Loki was utterly still, but flinched when as suddenly as it had reared, the invisible fire choked off, leaving behind scorched bedrock and rivulets of molten glass in place of the green. Through the powdery light Victor could make out the outline of her, a shadow made meager against a sky bleached to nothing, its celestial citizenry annihilated. But it was the silence that unsettled him—dense enough to register as pressure on skin but soft enough to carve into a form with purpose, of the type used to smother with. Her footfalls punched through it like klaxons. Her red-black skeleton passed them by with solemn, slow steps, shedding burnt flesh in its wake, deliberate smears of cooked blood and fat and ash, strange calligraphy on marble.

Loki drew to his feet and trailed behind her, and Victor after a sigh went after him, feeling sick and barely sensate but unwilling to admit that anything was amiss. They bumped into each other more than once in the descent into the entrails of the palace, the passageways stacked with crumbling manuscripts and tattered quills that stabbed their feet through the worn soles of their boots. The hall was not long at all, soon resolving into an atrium flanked with more columns, mosaics of deep-sea creatures, rusted tridents and lances twisted into pretzels. Exhausted, Victor lay down somewhere near the entrance, a handspan from the edge of the pool that took up most of the cavernous space. The tile that lined the floor, lapis lazuli, was cold against his face. The reflected light from the water was oddly soothing. Loki made as if to splash in after Leah as she entered the pool, her bones cracking open and throwing up steam, but hesitated when he saw Victor go down. Just past him Victor could see Leah sinking into waves whose shadows were turning mercury around her, or perhaps wax, congealing into pale flesh just under the surface. With the last of his strength Victor swept Loki's legs out from under him and heard a satisfying thunk and then turned his head to smile blearily at Loki's indignant, bloodstained, freshly-bruised face.

"You are not abandoning me here," he croaked out.

"Oh I'm sorry, I thought you were already dead," Loki hissed. He sat up with a grimace.

"I'm surprised that he isn't," Leah said, breaking the surface of the water. Her hair, just as long as before, lay flat against the curve of her skull, glossy from the water. It was a pity that the pool was so dark and the light filtering in from above so dim, Victor thought, and him laid out like an invalid.

"He's not partial to dying," Loki told her.

Leah's fingers crept up over the edge of the pool, the better for her to rest her chin against. She had nails again, a shade less pink than her lips and tongue. There was no trace of the fire that had been, not anywhere, and Victor found himself almost admiring how perfect her armor looked from the outside.

"Such a fool is doubly unwelcome than even you."

His nascent admiration vanished and Victor nearly said something ungentlemanly at that. He had a particular disdain for people who were poor hosts. But Loki chose that moment to rest his hand flat against the middle of his chest and Victor nearly passed out from the weight of the pain, the ugly words rushing out as a wheeze. Loki looked down at him pleasantly, and then turned to Leah with a serious visage, the kind children thought made them seem grown-up. Victor felt his own face twitching, mortified to have been so reminded.

"I don't wish to trouble you," he said, though Victor could feel his hand tremble. "I'm just glad to—see you. That you are well?"

Leah blew out a breath across her knuckles. Victor guessed that it was supposed to have been a raspberry. Perhaps the display of fury had sapped her as well. "I learned everything that I was to know and have become nothing and nowhere thereby," she answered. "Is that well enough?"

"Passably," Victor supplied, because Loki seemed tongued-tied, and the sight he found absolutely deplorable.

Leah's eyes traveled to him and back to Loki. She looked at him for a long time. Finally Loki mustered up a response. "Yours that I know, but—Leah—"

"Go away," Leah said, then dropped back into the water, hair finning out behind her like a sail, legs a flash of ivory, disappearing into the depths. When the ripples disappeared as well, Loki let out a breath.

"That went swimmingly."

Victor wished that he had strength enough to punch Loki right between the eyes, but finding himself slightly discomfited, settled for pushing his hand off, as forcefully as he could manage, which was rather sadly not. He gave voice to this very heartfelt wish and Loki sighed.

"You should have said that earlier, then at least Leah would have liked you better."

"She has very low standards," Victor said.

"You shut up about her," Loki retorted.

"She had you under a—"

"No, she w—she's my friend."

"Friendship is a curse. And by heartbreak you have overcome, how clever."

Loki loomed over him. "And just like that you think you'll prevail," he said coldly.

"No heart to break."

"Not three?"

"I gave them away. They served me ill," Victor said. "A long time ago."

Loki sat back. "I don't know why I ever wanted you to be my friend," he said. From the looks of him Victor could tell that he was about to embark on a monumental sulk, if only to cover up the fact that he was trying very hard not to cry.

"I am not your friend," Victor said. "I do not care for you. Not what you have done or what you have been through, either."

"Yes, yes," Loki muttered. He climbed to his feet and started to pick among the discarded bits of metal around the pool's edge. He faded out of Victor's senses. Victor had an absurd thought. "Maybe I should have waited to climb out of the rock," he wondered aloud, voice dropping. The thought in turn dropped him off the edge of a dark cliff, and when he came back to consciousness there was something extremely fluffy piled on top of him and he was, for the first time since arriving in this land for the dead, warm. He sneezed.

"Still alive," a girl's voice said from a great distance. She sounded disappointed.

Victor woke up to a mouthful of feathers and spat and coughed. He was entrapped within an enormous cloak woven out of—his eyes focused and then went cross-eyed from the effort—hummingbird feathers. He struggled out of the layers of feathers and looked around.

The pool had been drained, but by time—it had dried, rather, leaving behind a thick mineral crust on the bottom. In the same period the atrium had been filled up with a veritable hoard of weapons and armor, each piece encrusted with shells and patina. A sharp elbow poked him in the side and Victor looked down to see Loki, curled into a ball, frowning in his sleep.

"I was saving that," Leah said from behind them, making Victor startle and turn. She was wearing a gown of deep green brocade with a train embroidered with silver and adorned with tiny, fossilized winged insects. The dress covered all but her head and hands, which were holding a helmet designed for something much taller and bigger than any man. It was a beautiful gown, but Victor found himself disappointed, too.

"Now it has boy germs all over it," Leah said.

"Victor is very well behaved," Loki grumbled. Victor stuffed an armful of the cloak over him and stood up, releasing a cloud of red and blue-green feathers into the fresh air. The atrium was much bigger than he remembered it being, and the light that poured in from above was bright and clean. By contrast, the atrium itself was a mess with heaps of odds and ends everywhere.

"I didn't mean to ruin your cloak," Loki said, sitting up sleepily and pawing feathers from his mouth. "But Victor was cold and it was all I could find."

"It's only one more thing for me to hate you for on top of innumerable others," Leah said. "That is to say, you and your excuses mean nothing to me. At all." She tossed the helmet into a pile of rusted blades, where it bounced with a loud clang before coming to a rest against a pile of metal stirrups. Victor spotted the lie right away; she was merely bored from having had no one to talk to, was his guess. Loki was one thing, but it occurred to him to feel annoyed that Leah apparently did not see him as any kind of a threat.

"You dredged all these?" Victor asked while testing his limbs. The sleep seemed to have done him a good turn, though now he was completely famished. He looked at her curiously, and asked, in an effort to ignore his stomach, "Why did you let us sleep?" Instead of suffocating us or worse, he silently added.

"Because I found myself here only a scintilla sown, the rest wasted. There is so much to do. Important things," she replied, walking past him. Implying that they were not. Victor narrowed his eyes.

"You would understand, I suppose," she said. She glanced at Loki, who froze, still entangled in the feathered cloak. "If you were not birds, I'd not."

Victor frowned.

Leah continued: "I'll not have machines here, devices and racks. Or employ scribes to measure suffering, servants to dole out pain. None of that."

"What are you planning for such a disarray?" Victor asked, waving a hand at the rest of the atrium, genuinely curious.

She did not answer. Instead, she made her way down the side of the atrium towards the two of them, picking among the piles and humming under her breath. More than anything, Victor despised being ignored. The degenerate hospitality that they had been met with was simply an additional aggravation. No matter what her history with Loki was, it was of no concern to him, but disdain that he had not earned—Victor's frown deepened. At least a forthright attempt on their lives would have been _honorable_.

"I am not known to you, I realize, but I would have the courtesy of your reply," Victor said evenly, trying to keep a rein on his temper.

Leah tossed her hair. "I know everything that needs to be known."

He made a derisive sound. Leah finally turned to look at him, her face impassive.

"Here you are a claimant. A beggar. 'Ware dominion and its laws, mortal."

"You are speaking nonsense."

Leah shrugged. Her affected nonchalance was extraordinarily grating to Victor in a way that Loki's had never been. "I heard it told on birds' wings."

"Heard what," he said between clenched teeth.

"Something about asses kicking," Leah told him. Freeing himself from the cloak completely, Loki pushed his way between them with an embarrassed laugh, prompting Victor and Leah to wave the feathers away in tandem. They irritated her as much as they did him, the realization of which irritated him even more.

"Now, now, wonderful lovely merciful Leah, if say you birds tell truth, then you must also know we speak mostly jest," Loki said. Leah just scoffed. Acting as though she was more mature than either of them. Victor felt a sneer coming on.

"A dead world abandoned by its own dead, there is no claim and there is no fault," he said belligerently, trying to push past Loki, wobbly legs or not. "I will contest you."

Leah took a half step back and drew herself up, eyes growing very, very dark. The effect was spoiled somewhat by the stray feathers sticking out of her hair. "Dare, insolent boy, and _perish_."

"Let's not fight," Loki whined. He was going to try a different tack; Victor could see it in the piggish gleam in his eyes. Greedy. He had always been someone convinced that he could have it all.

"Clearly Victor is not dead—"

"It can be arranged."

"—and we do not bring you strife—"

"With the exception of your self."

"—but it made for a terrible repast, in any case," Loki finished, patting Victor on the arm and tugging on one of his muddy sleeves, white-knuckled.

Victor shook him off. "She invoked laws, fine! But I will not be called a _beggar_ by a girl playing house with trash left over from after the end."

"Stop escalating the situation!" Loki exclaimed, shoving him in the shoulder.

"Just stop," Leah said calmly. Victor wasn't fooled. The heat of her anger was still fresh in his memory. "Be quiet. Go away. You and your stupid human paramour."

"Victor is not stupid," Loki snapped, coming to his defense. Although the comment was quite unnecessary, it qualified as an acceptable gesture. Victor waited for the follow-up. When none came, he decided that any acknowledgment of _their_ combined foolishness would be altogether beneath him.

"Victor has his own country," Loki went on. "Which is a human country, but that is no small achievement. It has the most edited Wikipedia article _of all time_."

"Does it really?" Leah asked, faintly interested. "What?" Victor asked.

Loki made a sound. "I thought you were the one behind it."

"I do not Internet," Victor said to that. At their look, he amended, "I do not do internet, I mean."

"I heard that capital letter," Loki accused. "Don't try to pretend you didn't," Leah said.

"I am too important to bother with such trivial things. I have people for that," Victor said, rallying. With this Loki seemed as though he was mere seconds away from exploding with laughter and Victor did not care—he trusted that the calm, radiant dignity of his bearing made this abundantly clear. Loki fell into a pile of rusted blades, curling up in silent agony. Victor trundled over to the pile to haul him out of it before he scattered the pieces, for he was beginning to see the pattern in the mess laid out, not that he was going to admit to anything of the sort while Loki's friend-enemy was being so abominably rude to him.

"I was wrong," Leah stated after a pause. "You're both stupid."

Shockingly rude. _Heinously rude_. Wiping tears from his eyes, Loki clasped him around the shoulders, laughing.

"You may be right, alderliefest Leah," Loki said, at which Victor started to protest, vehemently. Loki continued, "Then so are you, for always being kind to fools."

"It's easy to be kind when you are in the right place," Leah said. Loki's arms slipped free and Victor felt a pang. She had meant for the remark to cut and Loki was bleeding laughter and Victor understood; his nightmare was exactly that, having nothing to return _to_.

"And what is that?" he asked Leah.

"A place of trial," she answered.

"I'm tired of those," Loki said.

"It's not up to you," Leah said with a sigh. She pushed a strand of hair behind an ear and started combing through a nearby pile of metal, but looking for what, Victor couldn't tell. "I am so past you. This conversation itself is the most stupid thing that ever was."

"But you allow it," Victor observed.

"If all things equal, and that is what I'll bring about, then what I allow will be no different from what I do not allow, in the end, and there will be no end," Leah said, revealing her architecture. "For all the things in all the realms—"

"Damn the realms," Loki said. Victor nearly sighed as well. Concentric untruths in labyrinthine rings—that was what he was tired of. If the alternative was to be stories that had done away with tellers, tales beribboned in empty phrases—

"How will you do that?" Victor asked.

"I'll bring the grammarians to heel. String them up by their tendons, upside-down." She looked around the atrium, but Victor knew that she saw beyond the walls of the abandoned palace and the borders of the abandoned continent to the ages that lay dormant.

"I have to wait for them to appear," she added.

"How long have you waited? Victor asked.

"I might make them myself," Leah said, changing her mind.

"But you haven't," Loki said slowly. "Why not?"

Leah leaned against a column, her hands behind her, her expression giving nothing away, but the truth was already unraveling and she made no move to reverse its undoing.

"You have no power to make us leave, or do anything," Victor said, but even as he spoke, knew that he had guessed wrong. Loki grew pale.

"Power? You are already within my power," Leah said bitterly. "Loki, you are no more."

•••••


End file.
